Abstract 550 Poster Session I, Saturday, 5/1 (poster 298)

Children require frequent assessments of their growth by their pediatricians and pediatric subspecialists. With increased pressure from managed care organizations to evaluate more patients in less time, it has become commonplace for practitioners to forego plotting data on growth charts in the traditional manner. This trend has led to oversights of an important aspect of patients' overall health and development.

GrowthCalc is a computer application developed to allow practitioners to quickly compare a patient's height, weight, weight for height, body mass index, and body surface area against established norms. The clinician or other health care provider simply enters the patient's gender, date of birth, date of measurement, height and weight, and is quickly returned results (actual values and standard deviation scores (SDS)). If measurements on two different days are entered, GrowthCalc also calculates height and weight velocity, again with corresponding SDS. Should the patient's bone age also be available, GrowthCalc computes the patient's predicted height and predicted height SDS. GrowthCalc calculates all parameters by evaluating higher order polynomials derived from published normal values. Users may review the references used to obtain the polynomials at any time while using the program. In addition, growth standards for specific patient populations will be added in the future (e.g. for Down's syndrome), and will be selectable by the user.

GrowthCalc is available on the Word Wide Web, and is implemented in the Java computer language. This enables users of any common computer platform (e.g. Windows 95 / 98, Macintosh, etc.) to access the program; in addition, it frees health care providers from reliance on commercial vendors that offer similar, proprietary applications. At Boston Children's Hospital, a password-protected version of GrowthCalc is linked to the hospital's computerized database; it automatically enters the demographic and clinical values into the program, further speeding analysis. The freely available version of GrowthCalc is available for public use at http://www.chip.org/chip/growthcalc.